1. PET TWIN. I know it’s a common observation that people look like their pets, but it was still a shock to me when my daughters saw a recent picture my wife had taken of our dog and said, “That looks just like Dad!” Of course I don’t see any resemblance between my physiognomy and a Yorkshire Terrier’s, but I am a little worried that others might draw the same conclusion my daughters did. At 54, I’m too settled with my looks to consider any extreme makeovers that might make me appear less canine-like, but I have made one important change. I no longer complain about the expense when my wife takes our dog to a professional groomer. I am suddenly very invested in making sure our little Yorkie always looks his best.

2. HIGHER PURPOSE. I was sitting with my youngest when she told me she had realized her true purpose in life. Given her musical and scientific talents, I thought she might tell me her life mission was to play some incredible piece of music that would lift people’s spirits or to discover a cure for a hitherto intractable disease. But instead she announced to me that she had realized she had been put on this earth “to eat roasted potatoes.” Ah, yes, she is truly her foodie mother’s daughter.

3. WATER HAZZARDS. As someone who downs several large oversized glasses of water per day, I can’t understand why my daughters can never finish the drinks they serve themselves. They litter our house with half-filled glasses of water or juice, and invariably when I reach for something on an end table or our kitchen counter I knock one of those neglected drinks over. As a result, simply moving through my houses forces me to be constantly cleaning up messes. It seems there are two possible explanations for why my daughters don’t dispose of liquids they no longer have any use for: 1) They forget their father is a klutz, or 2) They know their father is clumsy and they deliberately leave these booby traps around the house to torture me. Frequent readers of Dad Flashes probably won’t be surprised to learn I’m convinced the accurate explanation is #2.

4. FOREIGN FOREVER. When I was in college, I took a class in Medieval Literature and was shocked when my professor read Beowulf to us in Old English. None of the Germanic-sounding syllables he uttered bore any resemblance to the language I knew and spoke. I had a similar experience when my youngest was chuckling over a text she received because her friend was being funny by using a “texting style from when we were in the sixth grade.” My youngest is only in the ninth grade now, but apparently new forms of texting abbreviations have evolved in that three-year timespan. When I asked for more details, my daughter told me, “She was typing things like LOL, BRB, and GTG. No one uses those anymore, unless they’re being ironic.” Yeesh, just when I thought I might become fluent in texting abbreviations, I have to discover there are whole different epochs to them. There’s no way I’ll ever figure all of that out. So go ahead, girls, text your LMBOs, NSFLs, and SWAKs til your heart’s content. I have now accepted your codes will be as forever impenetrable to me as the language of the Anglo Saxons who roamed the British isles a millennium ago.

5. NO MORE RECALL. In my younger days, I could quickly recall the name of every movie I’d ever seen, and if friends were trying to think of a movie title as long as they mentioned at least one of the actors in it and even the briefest synopsis, I could readily identify it for them. They called me the walking movie encyclopedia. (Yes, encyclo – because my youth was decidedly pre-Wikipedia.) Those days, however, are long gone. Now I have trouble recalling the names of movies I’ve seen in the past year. Last week, my wife and I got into one of those conversations in which both of us were trying to recall the name of “that movie with Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother playing the mother of the star of that TV show about the women in prison, and the love interest is that handsome kid the girls had on a crush when he was in the high school musical movie.” And that was one we had just watched a few weeks earlier. (For the record, it was The Lucky One.) At this rate, it won’t be long before I have trouble figuring out what’s going on at the end of a movie because I can’t remember what happened at the beginning.